Server Migration Process

Nothing should slow your business momentum. Let our engineers handle your cPanel or Plesk migration so we can provide you with most efficient migration possible with as minimal downtime or business disruption as possible.

How the migration works.

We have split the process into seven phases:

Pre-Migration Planning

Initial Migration Phase

Migration Phase

Post-Transfer System Testing

Final Synchronization

DNS Migration

Certainty Follow Up

Pre-Migration Planning

An engineer from the Migration Department will send you login credentials request to your source server.
Additional request may be required from you to properly migrate your data if needed.

We always encourage our customers to give as much as information as they can than less as this will definitely shorten the time to complete the migration process and for your business to spring back stronger. Please visit the migration Form Request page to start.

Initial Migration Phase

Needs Assessment and Migration Feasibility Review

At this stage, a Senior System Administrator from the same migration team will run an audit on your source server, access the information and begin to formulate the best approach for the process. Among the things to check will be the transfer speed, disk space, CPU and RAM usage and other critical aspects of the source server.

Migration Phase

Initialization Of The Transfer Process

Once the details review is completed and an authorization from you to proceed in obtained, the migration process itself will be initiated. During this phase, we will start moving your data into our own infrastructure while continually updating you at each stage until completion.

Post-Transfer System Testing

Post file’s transfer, we will work with you to make sure that everything is functioning as they ought from your end. You will also be ask to check any custom configurations that were requested by you during the first step of the migration.

It is a recommended practice at this stage, to completely compare the two servers on both ends to ensure that everything was migrated properly.

Final Synchronization

Once the testing stage is completed and assured, the team will perform another synchronization at our own end. What this does is to update all files that have changed or are new to the destination server post testing stage.

This will ensure that any changes made to the original website are carried over, a stipulated step that we have come to know will save you and your team time down the line.

DNS Migration

Once a confirmation is obtained that the final sync was completed correctly and that you are happy with the result so far, DNS migration transfer will be initiated. It is simply about is pointing your domain(s) over to our network. This is refer in-house as the ‘bridge-over’ and if necessary, will coordinate with your own team to complete the DNS changes.

Your site, application or anything that relies on the Migrated System is expected to be functioning optimally at OCS Hosting Service platform. If it is a website, it will reachable on the net.

Certainty Follow Up

After the migration is finally completed, our validation team will follow-up with you to ensure that all process are running optimally and also to answer any other questions you may have. You can go in for a quick chat at anytime.

FAQ

How long does a migration typically take?

It is often difficult to calculate the actual time it will take to move your files and data. A wide range of variables affect this including the amount of data being moved, the complexity of the data, the speed of the network at the source and the distance between the old location and OCS hosting infrastructure.

Because of these variables, it is not possible to provide a 100% accurate time for completion as factors that wasn’t foreseen in the beginning processes such as network slowdowns, increased configuration times, and other tweaks can come into play. However, we do strive to keep you continually updated and will expeditiously complete the migration within the shortest possible time.

There are several ways to reach us. You can either submit a ticket to the migration team, or alternatively initiate a chat with one of our operators.

Please note that when our billing system is being upgraded, it may be off the grid for 5 minutes.

In such situation, if you are unable to create a ticket on the system, please visit our external support desk. The experience is pretty much the same.

What level of server access does a migration require?

That will depend on the kind of migration. If we are migrating from a dedicated server or VPS, you must obtain root -level access on the servers from which you wish to migrate and to which you wish to migrate. Our migration scripts require that root -level permissions exist on both servers.

If you are on shared hosting account, your control panel username, password, SSH port number (if have access to SSH) will do. If you your current hosting package doesn't have shell privileges, your username, password and control URL will do.

How much will a migration cost?

The initial migration is $67.00 unless a special authorization is granted by the billing department. First time shared hosting customers have free migration for 1 website while VPS and bare-metal server customers have free migration for 30 websites. When applicable, we will quote you a rate for the migration but generally, it doesn’t cost more than 6-7 cups of good coffee.

Will my site have down time during the migration?

Typically you will not have downtime upon switching the DNS to our server. But this is completely dependent on keeping your service online with your current provider as network propagation takes place.

The premise here is, if the service is up on both ends, the user will see your site online at one of the locations. Generally though, DNS propagation should complete within the 24-48 hour period after the actual change is posted.

If you are unsure what this is, propagation is the time during which your DNS zone data is spread throughout the internet after the initial change. Some ISP’s refresh their cache continually, others, less often. So, while this occurs, some users will still see your account hosted with the old network, others with ours.

What type of testing does OCS Hosting Service do to ensure that the migration will be a hitch-free success?

Initially we do test for speed to ensure the file transfers will complete in an acceptable time frame. If you are moving actual websites to us, we will test a handful of them post migration via a test link on the server, this is cross-referenced to the error log files to ensure there are no apparent issues.

I manually added some databases to my server and not from within the control panel. Will you copy these databases?

Sadly, no unless if you need to use either cPanel or Plesk. Our migration script only copy databases that a user created within the control panel using these two control panels.

The only recourse at this point is to recreate the existing database on our systems using our MySQL or PostgreSQL database wizard.